'Dom Hemingway' a fun and bawdy bender

"Dom Hemingway" showcases Jude Law like you've never seen him before. This curiously crime-free crime flick transforms the suave British actor, who typically plays slick, slippery characters equally balanced between charm and smarm, into a belchy, boozing boor with a receding hairline and a broken nose defiantly on display.

Jude Law plays the swaggering, swearing Dom Hemingway. After 12 years in prison for keeping quiet on a crime, he's looking to collect what he's owed. Along the way he tries to re-connect with his daughter.

He's captivating from moment one, the film opening on a shirtless, imprisoned Dom monologuing about an intimate body part shortly before the safecracker is released back into the wild. Hellbent on hedonism after 12 years in the slammer -- and expecting a big payday for keeping his trap shut -- Dom is effusive with self-destructive charisma, the kind of loose cannon you'd follow into an all-night bender in spite of your better judgment.

And the first half of the film plays with the energy of one of those benders, the newly freed Dom getting caught up to speed with his buddy and partner in crime, Dickie Black, played by a wry and ascot-sporting Richard E. Grant, who accompanies Dom as he seeks recompense from organized-crime boss Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir) for taking the fall that landed him in the slammer.

American director Richard Shepard has crafted a distinctly British-feeling film, and it's never more fun than when charismatic pros Law, Grant and Bichir are playing off each other with high-strung delight in increasingly demented situations.

But as with most benders, there's a hangover to be suffered. Because Dom has a dead ex-wife and a pretty, estranged daughter (Emilia Clarke) with her own fledgling multicultural family, the film gives way to a threadbare redemption narrative that stretches as uncomfortably as Dom's too-tight suit to cover this larger-than-life creation.

A persona as daring and colorful as Dom's muttonchops calls for something spicier than a warmed-over absentee-father-makes-right denouement, and the film has a tin ear for its own optimism. But "Dom Hemingway" is a naughty good time while it lives up to unpredictable bawdiness of its opening line.